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Wayne Rooney is the leader that Manchester United needs

Gary Neville

Up front: Wayne Rooney’s communication skills are as valuable as his grit and goal-scoring skills. Photo: AFP

The new manager-captain partnership of Louis van Gaal and Wayne Rooney is a powerful one that can help lift Manchester United back into the Champions League places as their Premier League campaign kicks off against Swansea City at Old Trafford.

Defying conventional logic comes easily to Van Gaal, who is not scared to shock. When he took over at United plenty predicted world war three between him and Rooney. At that point Robin van Persie seemed nailed on to be captain; but Van Gaal turned that expectation on its head, in the face of intense media speculation about how his relationship with Rooney would work.

What Van Gaal will have seen while watching him train every day is that he has passed the armband to the most intense player at that football club, with a ferocious attitude and tough mentality. He knows Rooney will fight to the last minute of every game and deliver goals, season in, season out.

Armed with this knowledge from friendlies and training sessions, Van Gaal has defused what many thought would be an explosive situation. Pictures show him hugging Rooney on the training pitch. I have no idea whether he hugs every player but there is no doubt he has made a conscious decision to bring Rooney on board: to place him at the heart of the new order.

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These Manchester United players are on watch. The depressing events of last season are not yet forgotten. Only if they respond through the quality of their performances will memories of 2013-2014 be laid to rest. And all parties know that no team rides roughshod over Louis van Gaal. Rooney is now in a new phase of his career with the chance to become the leader. There has been a sharp decline in leadership in football but Rooney has all the attributes.

By ’'leaders’' I mean people who are prepared not only to hold themselves accountable but hold their teammates accountable too. Rooney is one of a dying breed of footballers who is willing to call his teammates out. He can take criticism but also hand it out. His approach is the traditional one of not taking criticism personally – and expecting teammates not to take it personally either.

Van Gaal will have looked at Rooney and thought: this is a player who is not too proud to listen to criticism and not too shy to dish it out. That is captaincy material, as Van Gaal outlined in his press conference before the Swansea match. The next stage for Rooney is to think like a captain.

When I think back to his early days at United I remember his personality and cheekiness. Rooney was the only player who would dare pull up a seat at the coaches’ table in the canteen and ask Sir Alex Ferguson: ‘‘Am I playing tomorrow, boss?’’ The manager would cuff him about the head and say: ‘‘That’s nothing to do with you.’’ Other times, Rooney would sit next to Sir Alex on the bus and ask: ‘‘Who am I playing up front with?’’ He would just assume he was in the team.

When I was part of a group of senior players, with Vidic, Rio, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, Rooney and Patrice Evra were the most vocal. Rooney would face everything head on. I can think of many occasions when he would be screaming at the defence to move up or the midfield to close down. As captain, now, the other players will look at him differently. His teammates will expect him to offer help and advice. He will be expected to be the voice of the team more often with the media.

As Manchester United captain with a huge profile, in the peak years of his career, Rooney has one simple task: to lift the Premier League trophy. Anything else is a failure for a Manchester United captain.

There is much to excite him in this arrangement. He gets to start afresh with added responsibility: the biggest challenge of his club career. The media spotlight is hardly alien to him but he will feel it burn more than ever. Van Gaal has clearly decided that Rooney will respond well to being entrusted with leader status.

Through manager and captain, a strong sense of purpose should shape United’s work. Rooney has the qualities to lead by example on the pitch and through his no-holds-barred approach. He will even call his coaches out. Rooney will not hold back. He is one of the few footballers I watch now who could have survived 20 years ago, in what was a more brutal environment, where every decision in training was challenged, where he would have wired into his goalkeeper if he made a mistake, where being vocal was a virtue rather than the mark of a troublemaker. Ten minutes after calling a teammate out, he would join them on a sofa, returning to friendship mode. He pays no attention to age, seniority or reputation.

Now, he has to polish himself and make sure everything he says as captain of Man United is for the betterment of the team. He will be good at that, because football players have become a bit scared, a bit too sensitive, to speak to one another in forthright terms. Rooney could reintroduce the highest levels of accountability. We saw it with previous captains such as Steve Bruce, Roy Keane, Bryan Robson and Eric Cantona. With those men, nothing was allowed to pass unchallenged.

Rooney will promote conversation when things are not right. It is a real challenge for coaches in modern sport to get players to take ownership of their performances, and instil that culture. Player-to-player conversations can have an even greater influence than coach-to-player discussions.

Locally, in United circles, anticipation is high. There is a fascination around Van Gaal, who has time, with a relatively gentle start to the fixture list, to ready himself for a tough spell in October and November when his team faces Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal.

United is coming out of a dismal season – the worst for 25 years. I did not enjoy 2013-14 from a football point of view or in the way it ended for David Moyes. There is, though, a surge of hope, even if recruiting players is becoming so much harder.

The dark arts are multiplying. Gone are the days when clubs were content to speak to one another chairman to chairman. Now there is a maze and myriad of webs to contend with. The days of Manchester United being able to walk a player round Old Trafford and show him the club blazer are finished. Before you can even get to the player you will have to deal with the agent, the lawyer, the brother, the uncle.

United is still in the storm phase after Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement and the departure of Moyes. The club is still settling down. While targets are pursued, Tyler Blackett and Michael Keane have emerged as promising young defenders, and the confidence of other players such as Darren Fletcher, Tom Cleverley, Ashley Young, Phil Jones and Chris Smalling is on the up.

In two or three years, the judgment will be made on the basis of whether Van Gaal and Rooney are lifting the Premier League trophy above their heads. This new manager-captain partnership will hunt that target together, with similar intensity. They lead United into action against Swansea on Saturday and I expect them to cut down many teams along the way. Rooney’s time has come.

The Daily Telegraph

Gary Neville played 400 games for Manchester United from 1992 to 2011.